Intersect

Because we are multidimensional beings, I believe that every now and then we “consciousness jump” into a parallel reality. You’ve experienced this if you think about it long enough. Try to remember little moments in your life when everything just felt a little different, a little “off” from the previous day. This is not a good or bad thing. Don’t slip into the dualistic mindset of good and evil! We are multidimensional beings, so this sort of “reality slip” is part of who and what we are. If you stop to think about it long enough, you will remember moments when reality changed in such weird, little ways, you didn’t even notice at the time—but at some point in remembering the past, I suspect you’ve had a moment where you thought to yourself, “Huh. That was weird.” I’m not talking about a change in  perception . Hopefully, throughout our lives we grow and change. We should all be able to look back on our lives and see ourselves as different people now. Our  perception  of ...

Our entire  universe may be a hologram  in a seemingly infinite number of parallel realities. What does this idea do to our concept of living physically here and now? If there are parallel realities, then this existence that we are currently experiencing is just one of an infinite number of possibilities. The implication is even greater than that, though: Whatever can happen is happening in some parallel construct. Here, I am a musician. There, I am a construction worker. Here, I am a male. There, I am a female. Somewhere else, I am neither. Everything is not only possible, everything is happening. It’s just a matter of conscious awareness, and once we begin to tap into that conscious awareness, the way we relate to other people here and now changes forever. WE cannot help but be transformed into more accepting, more loving, more open-minded creatures, because we have begun to understand that everything we think we are, and everything we think someone else is, is just a matte...

Because the particles that form us exhibit quantum entanglement, and quantum entanglement is likely a result of parallel realities interacting, it stands to reason that humans are multi-dimensional beings. We’ve always known this on a basic level. We exist in a standard  Euclidean geometric space  (the  x, y,  and  z  we are all familiar with). After Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity,  Minkowski  created a more accurate mathematical model to describe our reality, adding  time  to our  x, y  and  z  coordinates. Since  time  is also considered a dimension, at the most basic level we are four-dimensional beings. However, we now understand there are even more dimensions, perhaps an infinite number of dimensions.  String theorists  have already worked out a nine-dimensional model that implies parallel universes. I believe that ultimately, scientists will come to the inevitable conclusion that the...

We are not alone. We are part of a vast, interconnected system. There is no individual action that does not in some way affect the entire system and the other beings participating in the system. For example, when we purchase a banana at the store, it is the end of a chain of events that began with the planting of a banana tree. It is also the beginning of a new chain of events that will affect everything from the number of bananas produced, to the salary paid to someone harvesting bananas. This is interconnection on a macro scale: the very large scale in which we exist. This macro connection is a reflection of the interconnection occurring in the quantum world, the unfathomably small scale that interacts to create all our macro stuff. When we look at the way particles exist at the quantum level, we can begin to get a feel for the way we are all interconnected at the macro level. In fact, the idea of  quantum entanglement   could profoundly change the way we think about what it...

God of all being, Help me realize that I am not alone. I am part of all You are. You are everything I am. We are forever bound together, as inseparable as the stars from the sky, and every bit as infinite. I pledge my life to You, Infinite One. Love the world through my heart. Serve the suffering through my hands. Proclaim justice through my voice. Make me a spiritual light for others also awakening to their Oneness with all Creation. Give us the strength to persevere in times of trouble, and the insight to understand that we are all forever bound together, one substance, formed from and through the One God of all being. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ, in whom we see humanity and our infinite covenant fully revealed. Amen.

Humans are seekers. Our curiosity has driven us out of the caves and into the stars. That curiosity, coupled with our keen powers of observation, helped a nomadic woman invent farming. Realizing some of the wheat seeds she dropped on the ground were sprouting into new plants, she watered and nurtured them until she had the world’s first intentional crop. Eventually, her tribe stopped wandering from food source to food source and settled down, paving the way for modern civilization. From there it was a few short steps to masonry and metalworking, to pyramids and empires. Once we began planting roots, there was time for art, music, literature and philosophy. There was time to simply ponder the great mysteries of being that we still wrestle with today: Why are we here? Is there any meaning to life? Is there anything in control of our world? How is the universe constructed? What happens when we die? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Are we finite or infinite beings? I believe we ...

Often, we undertake our search for love out of fear. We’re afraid to be alone, to die alone, to be alone with our thoughts. We’re afraid of people, because we’ve been taught to distrust everyone. Entertainment reinforces the notion that everyone is out to get us. Business people and politicians are portrayed as ruthless, power hungry jerks who will stomp on everyone on their way to the top of whatever heap they’re climbing. We’re seldom reminded that climbing to the top of the heap still leaves us at the top of a heap—a smoking, smoldering, steaming, stinking pile of  heap . I think our popular media shows a disproportionate amount of the worst of us. If aliens are watching our broadcasts, they’re probably staying as far away from us as possible. We are spreading our fear throughout the universe, like a plague. Discontent with destroying our planet because we’re too afraid of each other to share, we send electronic signals throughout the Milky Way, so the first impression another...

I am worthy of God’s love because  I AM  God’s love. Relationship specialists tell us that we can’t love another person until we first love ourselves. Most of us find this difficult to do, especially if we are leading the sort of intense, self-reflective life required of spiritual journeyers. Yet, part of our journey—perhaps even the ultimate goal of our journey, is to realize Oneness with God. Even intellectually, if we perceive ourselves as part of the Infinite Energy of the Universe, then we have an incredible, eternal love deep within our being. In fact, that eternal love  is our being. I am worthy of love because I AM love. Yet, rather than thinking about infinite, eternal love as something real—something more than an intellectual ideal, we spend our days, nights, months and years looking for things to fill the gaping internal emptiness we so often feel. We look for cards, flowers and chocolates to make us feel complete. We buy new stuff and more stuff and fill our ...

Valentine’s day is fast approaching. I find it ironic and more than a little heartbreaking (see what I did there?) that the greatest power in the universe has been reduced to a single day of the year. We’ve neutered the mind-boggling idea of a love so strong it can change our world, into a commercial holiday about cards, flowers, chocolate and corporate profits. We have removed any sense of  power  from the very idea of love. Instead, love is about being unfulfilled and looking for love, only to have your heart broken. In our entertainment, love is unrequited. Love is cruel. Love stinks. Love is about sex. Love is about  anything  other than an actual change of heart, mind and soul. Love should be about transformation.  When we love, we are transformed. Where once our primary concern was our own well being, now we care more about the well being of another. Where once we only thought about our own education, career, home and material goods, now we are conce...

One of the recurring biblical discussions I have with people is about the seeming contradictions The Bible presents about the nature of God. Most of us in the progressive church tend to think of God as a loving energy source, perhaps even as the ultimate source of love in the universe. Certainly, the Bible is full of stories about God’s love for all creation. At the very beginning of the Bible, God looks at the universe and declares it  good  (Genesis 1:1-2:2). However, the Bible also often portrays God as a petty, childish, masochistic, sadistic, genocidal maniac, as  Stephen Fry  is only too happy to point out. How do we reconcile these seemingly conflicting ideas? The problem stems not from the Bible itself, but from the ridiculously literal way in which we read the Bible (this is Stephen Fry’s issue as well—he’s too literal about the nature of God). Yes, the Bible is full of contradictions, because different people with lots of different ideas wrote it. It’s a ph...

The advances in nanotechnology have revealed a universe more harmonized than we previously imagined. This is important for those of us on spiritual journeys. We tend to think in terms of the “physical” world and the “spiritual” world. The “Parable of the Ten Virgins” is a warning about getting so caught up in the physical world that we miss the bigger picture. This is good advice but we’ve had this dualistic mindset about spirit v. physical for a long, long time. My molecular table story is meant to remind us that there is no separation of the physical from the spiritual. Everything is One, and everything is created out of One. The spiritual  is the physical. The unseen is the seen.  We can’t see the individual molecules in a table vibrating wildly. To us, there is a solid, stable table on which to place our stuff (which also appears solid, but is actually billions of wildly vibrating molecules). But everything solid and seen is created out of stuff that’s moving and unseen. ...

Way back in the 1980s,  Eric Drexler  wrote a world-changing book called  Engines of Creation .  His ideas were heavily influenced by the greatest, and least-hyped, physicist of our era,  Richard Feynman  (please visit his website if you’re not familiar with Feynman—you will be enlightened). Feynman and Drexler posited that it was possible (and better) to create physical objects from the “bottom up.” Rather than cutting down a tree and whittling away and sawing pieces and assembling a table from that tree, we could manufacture a table molecularly. A table is made out of wood, which comes from a tree, which is made out  of bazillions of individual molecules arranged in a form that, to us, looks like a tree. This is the way everything in the universe is built: molecularly (and sub-molecularly, as it turns out). Planets, stars, flowers and blades of grass, eggs and chickens all have molecular structures. A Chicken isn’t built by taking pieces of Chicken f...

Over the millennia, much has been made of the search for the “historical” Jesus. For a while I too got caught up in this madness, but I have come to the conclusion that searching for the “historical” Jesus is a fool’s errand. Jesus was a very common name in the ancient world, and if there ever was a single person on whom the stories in the Second Testament are based, any actual facts about that person have been long lost to the conflation of imaginative historical fiction and biblical literalism. So, I have concluded that trying to prove whether or not Jesus “actually” existed sort of misses the point of the stories, which were likely meant to be spiritual parables. Now, if we want to talk about Jesus as a rebel who spoke against the Roman Empire, the historical  context  is important—but it still doesn’t matter whether or not the rebellious Jesus written about in the Bible was a single historical person, an amalgamation of many people of the era (as many scholars believe), or...

In our church, we begin each service with a period I call “Tuning.” This is a couple of minutes for us to quiet our minds and center our thoughts on actively tuning into the ever-present energy of God that permeates the universe (because God  is  the universe). It is a time for us to consciously experience our Oneness with God. It sets the tone and stage for our entire experience, which we call “Connecting with the Infinite “ rather than “Worship”. I don’t think God needs to be worshipped. That’s an idea from a time when people thought every disaster and every blessing was directly caused by a superbeing living on a mountain or floating on a throne in heaven. Our task as spiritual beings is not to  worship  a superbeing—it’s to  connect  with the essence of the universe, God. That connection is transformative for both us and the reality in which we find ourselves. That transformation happens by consciously tuning into God, who doesn’t judge and doesn’t cau...